


Foundations

by EnglandsGray



Series: Who You Really Are [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Getting Together, Inspired By, Longer fic excerpt, My Dear Bessie, Post-Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem, Sherlolly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28225281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglandsGray/pseuds/EnglandsGray
Summary: ...I want you to know that our evening by the river was wonderful. If it was the last night I spend in your company I will die happy. Think about that, Sherlock, and read this beautiful book while you do.  Love, Molly xxxSherlock ran his thumb over her words, felt the depressions where she had applied varying pressure. He brought the book to his face and inhaled the scent of the page, the ink, her skin. She had kissed his name, he felt sure he would see the evidence of it under the scope.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Series: Who You Really Are [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884091
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	Foundations

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, Letters Live. Heart broken and made up all in an hour and ten minutes of brilliance. 
> 
> I was inspired by My Dear Bessie - a book of the letters exchanged by Chris, a soldier away at war, and Bessie, a cypher clerk at home in London - when I wrote my first fic in this fandom, 'Who You Really Are.' I read and heard Sherlock and Molly throughout this gorgeous true story of love across an incomprehensible divide. Of course, Ben and Loo reading their letters helps with that... and the latest video release contains a favourite exchange. 
> 
> This is an excerpt from that longer fic (Chapter 18 of 24). Forgive my self-indulgence in re-publishing, but I wanted to pay some small tribute to My Dear Bessie, Letters Live and to Loo and Ben. Their performances and all those included in the videos are such a lift at the moment. 
> 
> If you haven't already - pop along to the Letters Live YouTube channel and have a watch.
> 
> Also, sending a little Christmas love to OhAine and 3Seconds. Watch the busses, dears! <3 
> 
> Of course, all rights and credit to the creators of Sherlock and My Dear Bessie. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy xx

Baker Street

The only feature of the visit to Sherrinford, from which he had just returned, that stuck in his mind was playing with Eurus; the honing and strengthening of their performance. The rest was a blur, he couldn’t recall details of his conversation with his brother, the journeys, anything. It didn’t matter.

He climbed the stairs and made his way to the kitchen. Mrs Hudson had clearly been not-housekeeping, the surfaces were clear and clean, two mugs placed by the new kettle. The sight was at odds with the blackened walls and shells of cabinets above. The table remained covered in what Sherlock and John had gradually accumulated. He sat there with his coffee once he’d made it, picking over the items in front of him, lingering on the book held closed by the knife.

His phone alerted him to a text coming through. He took it out quickly but it was John, again. The third one today and the tenth or twelfth or however many in the last few days. He sent a reply.

Me: Do as you please. SH

He put the phone face down on the surface and went to run a bath. The boiler had yet to be replaced so it was no comforting prospect. As he returned to the living room a little while later, the tips of his fingers still numb, he heard the front door slam and he resisted the urge to busy himself. He had it coming.

John appeared in the doorway, an embossed paper carrier-bag in one hand, the motif of the Regent Street store glinting as the bag swung by his side. Sherlock felt a dropping in his stomach.

“If you’ve hurt her, Sherlock, nothing would _please me_ more than to knock you out,” John seethed, a muscle in his cheek twitching as he clenched his jaw. “But she is as bad as you – the only straight answers I get nowadays come from the baby.”

John thrust the carrier into Sherlock’s hands. He looked into it, surprised by it’s weight and saw not a rejected gift, but a paperback book.

“Returning your toothbrush?” John asked.

Sherlock picked the book out of the bag and turned it over to look at the cover.

MY DEAR BESSIE

A LOVE STORY IN LETTERS

“And your bedtime reading material?”

“Not mine,” Sherlock contested. He turned the book over in his hands, thumbed the often-turned pages, opened the tatty cover to the plate. It was Molly’s in every detail.

“Sherlock, what’s going on, mate?”

He looked at John. “I don’t know.”

__________

_I can’t speak to you just now. Literally, as well as anything else._

_But I want you to know that our evening by the river was wonderful – if it was the last night I spend in your company I will die happy. Think about that, Sherlock, and read this beautiful book while you do._

_Love, Molly xxx_

Sherlock ran his thumb over her words, felt the depressions where she had applied varying pressure. He brought the book to his face and inhaled the scent of the page, the ink, her skin. She had kissed his name, he felt sure he would see the evidence of it under the scope.

He had turned on his heel, leaving John alone in the living room, and closing his bedroom door behind him, he had read the whole book cover to cover by the light of a candle he found in the bedside cabinet. The task had taken him no longer than he expected, no longer than it had ever taken him to read any other literary work intended for entertainment; that is to say not very long. But where he partook of the occasional work of fiction, he did so having surmised the supposedly intricate plot and it’s predictable conclusion either from the blurb alone or certainly by the end of the first page.

This work, though – an annotated collection of letters written by two lovers (a soldier and a cypher clerk) who met and conducted a courtship during the Second World War – had eluded his grasp before he had opened it, the protagonists remained hard to predict throughout and the conclusion had left him thoroughly intellectually unsatisfied. In time gone by, this would have rendered the tome unworthy of shelf-space and it’s contents would never again cross Sherlock’s mind.

So why, then, did he clutch the book in his hands now, feel the weight of it as though it were ten times it’s size? He rested his head back on the pillows, the book on his chest. He closed his eyes and blew out a long exhale, brought his fingertips together.

_**'What’s today’s lesson, Professor Hooper?** _

_**English Literature? Could never be bothered with it.** _

_**Drama - now there’s a subject if you want textual analysis and** _

_**I always prefer to stand up for Shakespeare.'**_

**_The_ ** _**door behind him swung open and he turned to Molly.** _

_**She wore dark trousers, a blouse and cardigan, her lab coat.** _

_**Her hair was swept back from her face, clipped behind her ear,** _

_**the lengths falling over her shoulder.** _

_**She smiled at him,** _ _**colour in her cheeks.** _

_**She held the book open in her hands.** _

_'Bessie: If I lose you, I will have lost all', **Molly read**. _

_**Sherlock replied, framing the quotation as she had:** _

_**'Christopher: Nonsense. Firstly, I am not all.** _

_**Second, you are not going to lose me through any act of mine.** _

_**I am going to hold on to you as tightly as I can. A sort of death-grip.'** _

_**As they recited the lines, he placed his hands upon the**_

_**steel** _ _**counter-top in front of him, the white walls of the morgue forming around them.** _

_'Bessie: I want to be at your mercy.'_

_**'Christopher: One day let us hope you will be.** _

_**And then we shall really meet. You make me feel a little drunk when you place yourself at my command.** _

_**I love you.'** _

_'I love you.'_

_**Molly’s voice was strong and clear, her words rang around the room.** _

_**He spoke again:** _

_**'Christopher: If you think I am an ass you must tell me so, I am so desperately in need of you...'** _

_**His cheek stung and he staggered as she slapped him.** _

_**Her voice shook with barely suppressed rage when she spoke the next phrase...** _

_'Bessie: You have caused an upheaval within, an upheaval which contains so much_

_sweetness, ecstasy and pain. Something that I didn’t think I was going to know._

_Something that I thought did not exist because I had not known it..._

_I guess it’s the uncertainty of life in London that enhances it._

_I want to rest with you in peace. But you are so far away._

_It’s like touching the stars and then touching rock bottom.'_

_**'Christopher: I do not want to marry until I am sure that only natural causes,** _

_**including your cooking, can separate us.** _

_**I was afraid of marrying you because at all times mortal, in war,** _

_**man takes more risks than usual.'**_

_'Bessie: ...why couldn’t I come out to Greece so that I could stand in the way of any stray bullets?_

_You have moved me, right down, down to the foundations._

_You have accomplished what I shouldn’t have thought was possible._

_Y_ _ou have opened a vision of a new world, a new experience for me._

_I cannot help but be very, very grateful to you...'_

_**Molly slid a clipboard along the desk and he stopped it.** _

_**He was looking down at the (professionally and medically unethical, illegal, forged, perfect)** _

_**death certificate and port-mortem report for the man Moriarty had hired as kidnapper.**_

_**Ostensibly, the confirmation of his own demise.** _

_**'Excellent, Molly, he said – now, gaining access to the funeral parlour should be relatively straightforward,** _

_**i**_ _**f you follow my lead. I have adequate supplies to disguise us both,** _

_**you may wish to…'**_

_'He’s here.'_

_**'What?'** _

_**A locker door to his left opened and out slid the slab within,** _

_**laid upon it was a man of such striking likeness to him as to be repulsive.** _

_'I went on my own. And I didn’t wear a false nose.'_

_**He looked at Molly as he spoke again.** _

_**'Christopher: Before - I loved you, my idea of you...'** _

_**Molly reached out her hand and laid it upon his cheek. He turned into it, kissing her palm,** _

_**his eyes slipping closed.** _

_**'...but now I have seen, heard, smelt, touched the living warmth and flesh of you.** _

_**We now do know what we mean to each other.** _

_**I keep thinking of all the things I might have said to you,** _

_**the things we should but didn’t discuss.'**_

_**Molly pressed her forehead to his, he could feel her breath.** _

_'Bessie: Oh for the time when I might awaken during the night, hear you breathing beside me,_

_f_ _eel the warmth of your body and snuggle down in sheer happiness and comfort of your presence._

_I would like to start putting us on the map.'_

_**Every fibre of his being roared in want of her mouth on his.** _

_**He dragged himself away, held her at arms length.** _

_**'Christopher: My dearest one, I would prefer not to get married, but want you to agree on the point.** _

_**In the battle I was afraid, for you, for my Mother, for myself.** _

_**Wait we must, my love, my darling.** _

_**Let us meet, let us be, let us know, but do not now let us make many mistakes.** _

_**I am anxious, very anxious, that you should not misunderstand what I have said.** _

_**Say what you think, but please agree.** _

_**And remember that I was afraid and am still afraid.'** _

_**Molly smiled.** _

_'Bessie: My dearly beloved. What you wish, I wish._

_I want you to be happy in this, darling._

_Want to make you happy._

_Whilst you are afraid you will not be happy.'_

_**Molly’s spine straightened, her shoulders squared in his hands. She tipped her chin upwards.** _

_'We must get rid of those fears.'_

_**He fixed his eyes on hers.** _

_**'Christopher: I can never be as good as you deserve,** _

_**but I really will try very hard and I know you will help.'**_

_**Molly laid her cheek against his and whispered her final recitation in his ear.** _

_'Bessie: I’m thinking of you, hoping for you, with all that is in me.'_

Sherlock opened his eyes to inky blackness above him, the candle having extinguished. Flat on his back, with no way to orientate himself in the room besides the certainty of the surface under him. He didn’t know exactly where she was, but he could feel her presence, just beyond his reach.

Sherlock brought the book to his lips again.

_**Molly.** _

Two ordinary people forged a love which spanned unimaginable conflict, endured enforced separation and voluntary resistance. He desired her, loved her, relied upon her. She idolised him, understood him and endured for him. Offered to stand between a bullet and him.

So very like her, to take something he would otherwise find inconsequential – boring – and transform it into something he couldn’t live without. He turned back to the note she had written for him at the beginning of the book.

_I want you to know our evening by the river was wonderful._

Sherlock thought back over the evening in question, recalling what was said, accusations that had been thrown, tears that were shed. Shame roiled in his gut – if that was to be the last night he spent in Molly’s company she ought to take fury to her grave, not happiness. Sherlock laughed dryly; trust her to refer to her eventual demise with ease, while the reference sliced into him and almost brought him to prayer that this ‘happy event’ would be very eventual indeed.

Trust her too, to respond to his coldness and ignorance with love and generosity. Hadn’t she always? More than that, she had called out his faults and let him do the same to her. But where she remained the teacher and him the recalcitrant schoolboy with his shoes upon the desk at the back and his text rested open over his eyes, was she acknowledged her mistakes, her weaknesses. Ripped her heart from her chest and held it outwards. Molly was, by far and away, the bravest person he knew; the very definition of grace under pressure.

She could look back over an exchange like the one they had on the Embankment and endure what was uncomfortable, focusing only on what mattered.

Sherlock sat up, taking up My Dear Bessie in one hand and feeling around for his phone with the other. Locating it, he opened the home screen but stopped in his tracks when he saw that it was 2.00 a.m. He flopped back down on the pillows, set his alarm for three hours time and set his mind to sleep, even going as far as to promise himself a cigarette on the walk if he dropped off quickly enough to not look a complete wreck in the morning. Telling himself he had that level of control over himself was the battle half-won, in his philosophy.

He did fall asleep quickly, the book pressed to his heart.


End file.
